Dr. Andrew Wakefield on the History of the CDC

Tuskegegee 1932: The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (/tʌsˈkiːɡiː/tus-KEE-ghee)[1] was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service studying the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.[1]The Public Health Service started working on this study in 1932, in collaboration with Tuskegee University, a historically black college in Alabama. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201[2] did not have the disease. The men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance for participating in the study. After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men they would never be treated. In 1966 Peter Buxtun, a PHS venereal-disease investigator in San Francisco, sent a letter to the national director of the Division of Venereal Diseases to express his concerns about the ethics and morality of the extended Tuskegee Study. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), which by then controlled the study, reaffirmed the need to continue the study until completion; i.e., until all subjects had died and been autopsied. To bolster its position, the CDC received unequivocal support for the continuation of the study, both from local chapters of the National Medical Association (representing African-American physicians) and the American Medical Association (AMA).

In 1968 William Carter Jenkins, an African-American statistician in the PHS, part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), founded and edited The Drum, a newsletter devoted to ending racial discrimination in HEW. The cabinet-level department included the CDC. In The Drum, Jenkins called for an end to the Tuskegee Study. He did not succeed; it is not clear who read his work.[23]Buxtun finally went to the press in the early 1970s. The story broke first in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972. It became front-page news in the New York Times the following day. Senator Edward Kennedy called Congressional hearings, at which Buxtun and HEW officials testified. As a result of public outcry, the CDC and PHS appointed an ad hoc advisory panel to review the study. It determined the study was medically unjustified and ordered its termination.READ MORE

August 10, 2014, it was revealed that the deleted data from the CDC study of autism in 2004 showed a 340% increase in autism incidence in children who received the MMR vaccine on time (before 26 months) as compared with those who delayed the MMR until an older age. That is 13 years and tens of thousands of children with autism since that study.

According to the same CDC study, the risk in autism in Black children is twice that of White children.

Dr. Lewis was the only EPA scientist to ever be lead author of articles published in Nature and Lancet. In 2008 and 2011, Nature reported on a lawsuit he filed against EPA scientists for covering up problems with chemicals in organic fertilizers (biosolids) linked to autism, and his investigations into fraud charges leveled against Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Listen to Dr. Lewis’ interview or read the transcript of it below to learn what he discovered while pouring through the documents related to the baseless charges against Dr. Wakefield. Dr. Lewis is a renowned environmental scientist who is sponsored by Focus Autism.

Teri Arranga: Dr. David Lewis is an internationally recognized research microbiologist whose work in public health and environmental issues as a senior-level Research Microbiologist in EPA’s Office of Research & Development, and member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia has been reported in numerous news articles and documentaries from Time Magazine and Reader’s Digest to National Geographic. He is the only EPA scientist to publish first-authored articles in Nature, Lancet, and Nature Medicine.